With a desire to become more entrepreneurial, and competitive pressure creating true urgency, a VP-led F100 Financial Services team came to us with a big, disruptive idea based on early trend research, but with significant uncertainty on how that idea should come to life for customers, and be operationalized within the business.

APPROACH

Across 8 weeks, we partnered with the multi-functional team to design, iterate, prototype, and validate their disruptive idea against a specific consumer segment, and created a roadmap detailing how to get the prototype to market.

We began by casting the vision for our work together and engaged in a two-day knowledge audit to fully leverage existing assets and introduced the team to foundational tools, methods, and entrepreneurial leadership mindsets via our Lean Growth Playbook and Hustle Handbook.

Next, we led the team through a rapid-fire five days of testing and learning, with the goal of developing a MVP rooted in consumer insights. By leveraging internal experts, consumers, and external trends and analogs, we deeply grounded the team in the problem they were attempting to solve. The team then diverged to generate and iterate several potential directions for the idea, ultimately landing on one high potential strategic direction.

For a quick, initial pulse-check from consumers, we led two rounds of quick 30 min 1:1 interviews via webcam—with optimization in-between. We leveraged insights from this research and led the team to generate key assumptions (including key elements of the consumer journey and business model), and then prioritize the riskiest assumptions from which to build an initial, conceptual prototype.

After a leadership team check in, we kicked off the next round of testing. The team developed and built a prototype, utilizing learnings from earlier in the Strategy Sprint in order to further validate the solution, and gain key insights.

During this phase of the work, the team began to lean into the process and hustle like entrepreneurs; they stopped saying “We can’t,” or, “We aren’t going to go figure that out,” and started saying, “What has to be true for us to make this work?”

To test the solution, we watched in real-time as 10 consumers were exposed to the prototype and asked key questions in order to gain quick, targeted feedback on our assumption. Having confirmed some of our critical assumptions, we continued to move forward. Next up was mapping the consumer journey and identifying key requirements and features needed to quickly action the solution.

The team emerged from our 8-week journey with a validated prototype for their top strategic direction, along with key design requirements and a roadmap needed to deliver the validated prototype.

IMPACT

In just 8 weeks, we helped the dedicated cross-functional client team go from uncertainty to confidence through crafting, iterating, and validating an entire platform, complete with a roadmap for bringing the emerging business opportunity to life. Throughout the Strategy Sprint, the team stayed committed to the vision, but flexible with the “how,” and maintained openness of dissenting opinions in order to push ideas forward. Beyond the immediate business result, the team was exposed to and started to build Lean Innovation capability and entrepreneurial leadership muscle for the uncertain road ahead.